Wasserstein-infinity stability and mean field limit of discrete interaction energy minimizers

Abstract: In this paper we give a quantitative stability result for the discrete interaction energy on the multi-dimensional torus, for the periodic Riesz potential. It states that if the number of particles $N$ is large and the discrete interaction energy is low, then the particle distribution is necessarily close to the uniform distribution (i.e., the continuous energy minimizer) in the Wasserstein-infinity distance. As a consequence, we obtain a quantitative mean field limit of interaction energy minimizers in the Wasserstein-infinity distance. The proof is based on the application of the author's previous joint work with J. Wang on the stability of continuous energy minimizer, together with a new mollification trick for the empirical measure in the case of singular interaction potentials.